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Nalates Urriah

Second Life Bits Week 38

RSS Feed Change

I am not up on what is happening here. But, Oz Linden said something about upgrading the Linden systems to RSS2, from the RSS1 they are running now. RSS is: Rich Site Summary. Which is a format for delivering regularly changing web content. Feedly reads the RSS feed from web sites to do its thing.

So, I expect this to be a change to the Linden web sites. Newer is better. Right?

310 – Primrose softblue

SnapShot Panel Revisions

Many weeks ago we got a new Snapshot panel. The panel was designed by NiranV and has been revised by him again. The revision is being built into the SL Viewer now. There is some problem with the underlying Freeze Frame feature. Once that is resolved we will see the change appear in an RC Viewer.

Clearing Cache

When I first came to Second Life the standard fix for everything was clear the cache. Three or four years ago that changed. Clearing cache is almost never a solution to most of the problems we run into. Now the common fix for most things is restart the viewer or restart the computer and viewer… or gateway, router, computer, and viewer.

The recommendation that drives most of the support people crazy is when they hear someone complain about lag and they say they are going to fix it by clearing cache… Using file downloading as an analogy, in essence, they are saying my file has not finished downloading yet. I’ll speed it up by discarding the part I have and starting over… right. Bad move.

Icon Loading

One of the problems we have known about for sometime has to do with chat avatar icons. Those tiny little icons/pictures in chat. What happens is the viewer downloads our profile picture and makes a tiny image for chat. The problem is the viewer incorporates this as a user interface image and those are NEVER discarded during a viewer session.

So, if you are a member of a large group, say Firestorm Support, your viewer is going to be downloading hundreds of large images and placing them in texture memory. After a time this leads to Texture Thrashing… where you see something render to a nice crisp image then go blurry and re-render again. The process repeats. Texture memory is full and the video card is swapping out textures. We call this thrashing.

Oz Linden would love to see this fixed. But, he doesn’t have enough people to do the things they want to get done. So, priorities are set and Lindens work on what they think is the best use of their time for the greater number of SL peeps. This thrashing issue is too far down the pile for them to get to it.

Fortunately, there are a couple, I think couple, of TPD’s working on a fix. Apparently this is not low hanging fruit. So, it may some time before we see the fix rolling out.